by Thomas Nashe
175. ‘In frequent use’ (M. gives references to Gammer Gurton’s Needle and The Two Gentlemen of Verona).
176. Imprimié aujourd’hui.
177. (?) Advantageousness.
178. Gonorrhoea.
179. Poco, a poco: Little by little (the gradual efects of venereal diseases).
180. Game played with a balloon.
181. Panada is a dish in which a basin of boiled bread is flavoured with sugar, fruit or spices.
182. (?) Beggars with faked diseases or infirmities, or perhaps a reference to the popular song ‘Calino costure me’ (F.P.W.).
183. A halberd.
184. Milk, butter, curds and cheese.
185. F.P.W. suggests read ‘zeal’.
186. Makes up a set of rhyming verses.
187. Mops for cleaning ovens.
188. A reference to Sir John Davies’s Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing, 1596.
189. ‘A chamber utensil enclosed in a stool or box’ (NED).
190. Privies.
191. Said to have published an Enconium of Tuftmockados in 1582.
192. M. suggests ‘fussing’.
193. Pudding boiled in a bag.
194. A Swiss (thought of as especially credulous).
195. Heads or helmets.
196. Good metal.
197. ‘So many heads, so many opinions’.
198. Toys, like tops, for spinning (metaphorically: fancy, farfetched ideas).
199. Meaning uncertain, but cf. Strange News: ‘Turlery ginkes, in a light foot jig, libels in commendation of little wit very loftily’ (M. Vol. I, 296). Also Harvey’s description of SN as ‘a Turlery-ginks of conceit’ (M. Vol. IV, 178).
200. With grace and favour.
201. Adornment, embellishment.
202. Circumlocutions.
203. ‘Keeping to the point’.
204. ‘Woe to the Golden Fleece’.
205. Ingratiating.
206. Greedy folk.
207. Grains of paradise, an African spice.
208. Eisenburg in Hungary (?) (M.)
209. Crushed or pressed in the curd.
210. Dried in an oast or kiln.
211. Meaning unknown.
212. Penny.
213. Leather-coated labourer.
214. Morsel.
215. Smoking.
216. merchant and chapmanable: Saleable.
217. Inspector.
218. Scaly.
219. Glass.
220. Valuables.
221. Title used by Roman Emperors.
222. (?) Sooty, dirty.
223. no ho: No stopping.
224. Put them in difficulties.
225. Shovels.
226. M. suggests should read ‘abnuo’: ‘I do not disagree’.
227. give… washing: Submit to insult.
228. Sprat-catchers.
229. Rendezvous.
230. ethiope pitchboards: ‘Fanciful name for a ship’ (NED).
231. Sale by auction, or public sale.
232. Here probably meaning Iceland (see Virgil, Georgics I, 30).
233. ‘Yerk’ could mean stitch, lash out, beat, jerk, push, pull. Basic sense here probably ‘to capture’.
234. The ling is a kind of codfish found in northern seas. Further meaning untraced.
235. Large cod used for salting.
236. Curly-tailed.
237. A dog, usually a mongrel.
238. Icelandic lapdog.
239. Throw of five and one at dice, i.e. ‘a good throw’, ‘a good way’.
240. Speeding.
241. An arrow.
242. Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 654 – 5; and Virgil, Aeneid, VIII, 808 – 11 (M.).
243. Refuse of flax, hemp, etc. (M.).
244. A young gentleman.
245. Swiftest.
246. Hindrances.
247. Music or a dance.
248. After John Hunyade (c. 1400 – 56), hero of wars against the Turks.
249. clowns… shoes: Peasants, boors.
250. Joints of meat from the animals’ backbones.
251. Skewers.
252. Domingo was a name for a drunkard; Rufus is the red herring.
253. A magician in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale.
254. Munch.
255. Bezoar, antidote for poisons.
256. For drawing liquor.
257. Conjunctivitis, common in Attica. Pericles called Aegina the eyesore of the Piraeus (Aristotle, Rhet. III, 10).
258. Form of service in use before publication of the English Prayer Book.
259. Lucre (after a character in Three Ladies of London by R. Wilson).
260. ‘Like a thousand’.
261. Strutted.
262. buskined braves: Swaggering style.
263. Circe’s Heypass and Repass: Magician’s hocus pocus.
264. Eloquent.
265. Sixteenth-century Italian author of the standard work on mythology.
266. St Ulrich, on whose day fish were offered in churches.
267. Contradicts us.
268. Zeno of Citium illustrated a point of argument by opening and closing his fist, and Zeno of Elea argued the unreality of motion.
269. Sinew, clench.
270. Close-fisted, grasping folk.
271. Warriors who took Troy.
272. Hospital.
273. Greatness.
274. Reckon up.
275. The figure of the cross was commonly placed at the beginning of the alphabet in the hornbooks.
276. The ‘bull’s hide’ of ground purchased by Dido when she fled from Tyre to Carthage (Aeneid, I, 367 – 8).
277. County palatine, dignitaries attached to the Crown, such as the Earl of Chester and the Duke of Lancaster.
278. Pregnant, productive.
279. Small fishing boat.
280. Small barrel.
281. Strengthen (by engrafting feathers).
282. Pale blue.
283. Spurring on (rowel: the extremity of the spur).
284. Hackluyt refers to a ruthless ‘Tartar prince called Murse Smille’, Principal Navigations, 1589.
285. Unsurpassed, peerless.
286. Inhabitants.
287. Presumably an error, probably ‘intestine’, internal.
288. Greet with a gift as token of good will.
289. ‘What they got in the bridle, they lost in the saddle.’
290. Clasps, brooches.
291. Recompense.
292. Finely tempered swords of Bilbao.
293. Owner of Pegasus, slayer of the Chimera.
294. By London Bridge, a centre for proclamations.
295. The form in which a sheriff reported his inability to make a required arrest, the man not being within his jurisdiction or bailiwick.
296. Jocks, lads.
297. Supposedly because the highlanders’ legs were reddened by exposure.
298. Cutting, tearing.
299. Once upon a time (in those days).
300. Robert the Bruce.
301. Grief (deuil).
302. Short-swords.
303. Innocent.
304. Win applause.
305. Flock, shoal.
306. On earth, as opposed to ‘the upper air’ which was unaffected by storms.
307. Inhabitants of a city in S. Italy, proverbial for luxury.
308. Shining.
309. i.e. the spheres.
310. Meaning unknown.
311. A capriol, a jump which horses could be trained to perform.
312. Dances the lavolta.
313. Gilded, golden.
314. Landgrave, a German count or prince.
315. Alchemical.
316. Barked.
317. Somersaulted.
318. Made a series of somersaults.
319. The last man.
320. Harrow; a cry of denunciation.
321. Popular verse-romance, early fourteenth century.
322. Kastriota
, fifteenth-century Albanian patriot (derived from ‘lskander-Bey’, the Turkish name for him).
323. Tender.
324. Skilled.
325. Blacken.
326. Impute the dirtiness of the collier’s trade, commonly reckoned to involve much cheating.
327. (?) Silent.
328. A courtesan.
329. Alchemy.
330. Goes his rounas.
331. Wallets, satchels.
332. Libyan giant, defeated by Hercules.
333. Sneezes.
334. ‘There is no redemption from the inferno.’
335. Puzzle, riddle.
336. Quibble.
337. Turbaned blockheads.
338. Bowls, drinking-cups.
339. Tyrant of Syracuse, 361 – 289. B.C.
340. Tyrant of Syracuse, fourth century B.C., notorious for plundering shrines.
341. Joseph Justice Scaliger (1540 – 1609), or Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484 – 1558), both brilliant scholars.
342. Marrowbones, knees.
343. Hay-rakes.
344. Solemnly.
345. With a vengeance.
346. Angrily.
347. Demy or mandillion: Sleeveless coat.
348. Stomach.
349. Whom, according to Hackluyt, the Persians regarded as Mahomet’s true successor.
350. Oppose, controvert.
351. Foolish.
352. ‘From the egg’.
353. Parish register.
354. Raphael Holinshead, author of Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577, enlarged 1586).
355. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, the chief source of which was the poem by Musaeus, a fifth-century Alexandrian.
356. Where booksellers had their stalls.
357. Pigsney, term of endearment.
358. Dabchick, a bird supposed to hide under water.
359. Ducking water spaniel: ‘Used in falconry to put up water birds’ (M.).
360. Dusk.
361. Jerk.
362. Spacious, roomy.
363. Hag, beldame.
364. Deliberately.
365. Harlots (Cytherea = Venus, Venus’ nun = prostitute).
366. Without let or hindrance.
367. Dealing in petty commerce.
368. Bad-tempered.
369. Warrant certifying that goods have passed through the customs.
370. (Permission) to cross.
371. Release from life (literally ‘he is quit’).
372. Leaping (as on horseback).
373. Pun on leman, lover.
374. Children’s game played with pebbles.
375. Queen of Nineveh after Ninus’ death.
376. Containing hair-lotion.
377. Plasters (as for healing a wound).
378. Though in fact this later part of Hero and Leander was written by Chapman.
379. bread and crow. Meaning unknown.
380. Depressed.
381. Fast-moving chariot.
382. Called.
383. In The Voyage of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1360), a compilation of travel stories sometimes attributed to Jean d’Outremeuse.
384. Pregnant.
385. Swollen.
386. A reference to a Spanish romance by Luis Hurtado.
387. M. quotes Stow on a sailors’ tavern: ‘Amongst others, she, Mother Mumpudding (as they termed her), for many years kept this house.’
388. The supernal gods.
389. The daughter of Humber, drowned in the Severn. Humber himself was drowned in the river named after him.
390. to cast and scour: To make them vomit
391. Chose.
392. Those armed with short lances.
393. Trudge.
394. ‘The seas terrify us and the sad aspect of the deep’ (Ovid).
395. Here meaning allies, backers.
396. Jack o’ both sides (M.).
397. Vice character in the play Cambyses.
398. Merman.
399. Draw up.
400. Meaning unknown.
401. M. suggests this means ‘In the abstract’, Laertes having little property to bequeath Ulysses.
402. Bring low.
403. journey or canvazado: Day’s fighting or sudden attack.
404. Petrus Alfunsi (1062 – 1110) whose tales, Disciplina Clericalis, were sometimes printed with Aesop’s Fables.
405. Poggio, another writer of fables.
406. Over 10,000.
407. Infancy.
408. poldavies entiltments: Awnings, coverings of coarse linen.
409. Very small (literally the size of a page in a book, one-sixteenth the normal size).
410. High place.
411. Lowestoft.
412. ‘Tattered’ in 1599 edition, (‘tattered’ in Harleian Miscellany, 1745).
413. Unloaded.
414. papal chair… fasted: Vigilius was Pope, 537 – 555. M. points out that vigils wore instituted earlier than this, and calls Nashe’s observation ‘a piece of popular etymology’.
415. Lance-knights, mercenary foot-soldiers.
416. Store.
417. Rubbed, treated.
418. Turquoise.
419. Meaning unknown.
420. Copper alloy used asleaf-gold.
421. Lecherous.
422. Knife used for cutting purses.
423. Immediately.
424. Hesitated to come to an agreeement, ‘dithered’.
425. Mulligrubs, a fit of depression.
426. Suffice.
427. (?) Gut, disembowel.
428. Literally a stupid greasy shoemaker.
429. Faeces.
430. Inhaled.
431. Choked.
432. M. suggests a reference to some lost ballad.
433. A thrust in fencing.
434. ‘That part of the play where the plot thickens’ (NED).
435. Perhaps a reference to a ballad (M.). Swart-rutters were bands of irregular troopers in the Low Countries.
436. Phocae are Neptune’s team of sea-calves. M. points out that it was a bull that frightened Hippolytus’ horses.
437. It was Helios, the sun-god, who sent the furies, as punishment for choosing blindness rather than death.
438. ‘As if in the circus or arena’.
439. Privy.
440. Treacherously.
441. Equivocations, circumlocutions.
442. Small ring.
443. ‘Fools sing to the deaf; evil brothers bewitch a dea man.’
444. Perhaps a reference to a popular song with the lin ‘Friar how fares thy bandelow, bandelow’; perhaps idenified with ‘Friar Sandelo’, Faustus, III, 2.
445. Correctly a sequence of thirty Requiem masses.
446. ‘The limbo, where our fathers have gone before’.
447. ‘Unanimously’.
448. Heads.
449. Useless.
450. Misers.
451. Bagshaw is Bagshot in Surey, much pestered by highwaymen, ‘baw waw’ (or ‘bow wow’) being commonly associated with references to it in Elizabethan plays (F.P.W.).
452. Lags, dawdles (NED).
453. the bubbling of Moorditch: Meaning unknown.
454. Perhaps a reference to a writer called Durden who called himself Elias (F.P.W.).
455. A reference to the several pretenders who claimed to be Don Sebastian after his death in 1578.
456. Payment for the gullible.
457. Heraldry.
458. Retreated, beaten.
459. mingle-mangle cum purre: Said to be a call to pigs to come to the trough.
460. Like, approve of.
461. Pancras, a district of unsavoury reputaton.
462. Pagans, heathens.
463. Strained, overstretched.
464. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert (1470 – 1538); a judge with many legal works attributed to him.
465. Dr Lopez, accused of a plot against the Queen’s life and tried in 1594.
&
nbsp; 466. Playing the lawyer, arguing.
467. Blockheads.
468. Part of a herring.
469. Perfumed with incense.
470. Published c. 1535, (Erra Pater unidentified, probably fictitious).
471. ‘Swollen’ Antimachus; a verbose hellenistic love-elegist.
472. Spanish governor.
473. A velvety kind of taffeta, arranged in tufts.
474. Massed sacrificial offerings.
475. One of the Erinyes, goddesses of vengeance sometimes represente as like the Gorgons, whose looks turned the beholder to stone.
476. The laurel.
477. Ensnare.
478. This speech… audience: This passage ‘seems to have no meaning whatever’ (M.).
479. Callisto, turned into a bear and placed in the sky as Arctos.
480. privy… Pierides: Private pipe of the Muses.
481. Cow-turd.
482. Ephesian poet of second century A.D.
483. Wrinkled.
484. ‘Let the king run, long live the law’; usually the other way round (vivat rex, etc)
485. Rhadamanthus, one of the three judges of the dead.
486. ‘It is understood’.
487. Presumably ‘auspicious’.
488. Tormenting.
489. Look-out man on the Argo, proverbially sharp-eyed.
490. The groat was a fourpenny-piece.
491. The angel was worth fify pence in Edward VI’s time.
492. Seriously.
493. Play by Ben Jonson c. 1598.
494. Philippe Venus, published 1591; author given as Jo. M.
495. ‘Can it have originated in a jesting allusion to the story of St Bernard riding all day by the Lake of Lausanne, so absorbed in meditation that he did notsee it?’ (M.).
496. Magic horse given by Charlemagne to Renaud.
497. A dance or tune.
498. Decry, disparage.
499. ‘It is proved’.
500. ‘From the moon to the sun’.
501. (?) Head.
502. ‘He himself.’
503. Fancy dishes in cookery.
504. Kegs holding 720 herrings.
505. Rebel leader in 1381.
506. M. suggests meaning ‘cash down’, the Greeks being hardheaded businessmen.
507. ‘It seems to allude to the dressing of herrings with the tail in the mouth — as fried whiting are served at present’(M.).
508. ‘Let forth or utter as in driblets’ (NED).
509. Have an argument (pick a bone).
510. Putrid, contemptible.
511. Rancid.
512. Rank, of a bad smell.
513. Namely, to wit
514. As horses go, seeing they are horses.
515. Hans van den Veken, a Dutch merchant with a share in the ship seized by the ‘pirate’, Gilbert Lee, in 1588 (F.P.W.).
516. i.e., the great antiquarians had neglected the red herring.
517. lurcones or epulones: Meaning unknown.